Prince Harry must wait as Cressida Bonas ‘wrestles’ with choice between stage career and a royal husband

Her two public appearances with Prince Harry prompted speculation about an imminent royal engagement, but Cressida Bonas has told her closest friends she is not yet ready to settle down, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

Miss Bonas, 25, a former dance student who works in marketing, harbours ambitions of a career on the stage but knows she would have to give that up if she joined the Royal family.

She is said to be “wrestling” with the knowledge that she must choose between her career and her royal boyfriend.

Prince Harry has told her he will wait until she feels ready to get engaged.

“The bookies have been offering odds of 8/13 on an engagement this year,” said a friend, “but based on what she has told everyone, I would say it’s less than evens that anything will happen this year.

“People talk to her all the time about Harry and she gets quite cross and says, ’I don’t want to get married yet.’

“She hasn’t been invited to meet the Queen yet, so she’s not at the stage of an engagement being imminent.”

The Prince will be 30 in September, a typical age for members of the Royal family to marry, but he will want to avoid a repeat of his ill-fated relationship with his only other long-term girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, who called it a day after five years of struggling with life in the royal goldfish bowl.

“If it was up to Harry he would get married straight away but he is very sensitive about her on this particular issue,” said a source. “Harry has told her he will wait.”

Miss Bonas, who has been dating the Prince for almost two years, attended her first royal engagement with him on Friday last week, when he spoke at a youth rally at Wembley Arena in London.

The couple sat together in the 12,000-strong crowd, kissing and cuddling in the knowledge that they were being photographed, which was interpreted as a sign of growing confidence in the strength of their relationship.

Two days later they attended the England versus Wales Six Nations rugby match at Twickenham.

But friends of Miss Bonas said her first royal engagement was “no big deal” and its significance has been overstated.

The Prince attended the Wembley event as a favour to his long-standing friend Holly Branson, the daughter of Sir Richard, who is also related by marriage to Miss Bonas. Her half-sister, Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, who was once romantically linked to the Duke of Cambridge, is married to Sir Richard Branson’s son Sam.

“I don’t think they did it to make a statement, it just happened, it was a natural development,” said a source. Regardless of how much planning went into the event, Miss Bonas’s decision to pose for photographers as she arrived was a marked departure from previous attempts to dodge them.

Friends say that her reluctance to be photographed is more to do with shyness than anything else, and that in recent months she has decided to “get a grip” and accept the inevitable.

Miss Bonas is “not really a party girl”, said one close friend, “though when she is at a party she is terrific fun. She is very funny, incredibly affectionate, incredibly sweet. Harry won’t find anyone better than her because there isn’t anyone better than her.

“The thing about her that would surprise people is she is quite strict – strict with herself and strict with Harry, and it’s no great coincidence that Harry is a changed man since he has been seeing her.

“She just will not put up with bad behaviour. She tells him off, she says, ‘You’re not having another drink’. He doesn’t smoke any more, she has stopped all that.”

Miss Bonas was unhappy when pictures emerged of Prince Harry cavorting naked with female guests in a Las Vegas hotel last year. “She was staying with her father when the Las Vegas story broke,” said a source. “She had a heart to heart with her family who told her Harry would be very lonely and very upset, and if she still wanted him as a boyfriend she should grab him and take him off somewhere, and that’s what she did, they went to stay with her aunt and they got through it.”

A former Stowe schoolgirl who studied dance at Leeds University – also the alma mater of Chelsy Davy – and later at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in Greenwich, Miss Bonas has turned down well-paid modelling jobs because she fears “it’s only her royal connection they’re interested in.”

“Her life and her career are on hold because of the relationship with Harry,” said a close friend. “She wants to be a dancer, she loves the stage, absolutely loves it. It’s like a virus that has really got into her system and she is wrestling with the problem of how to square that circle.”

Miss Bonas’s mother is the Sixties model Lady Mary-Gaye Curzon, the daughter of the late Earl Howe, whose family predates the Norman Conquest and includes Sir Winston Churchill. Her father is Jeffrey Bonas, an Old Harrovian businessman.

Her close friends include Princess Eugenie, who introduced her to Prince Harry in the summer of 2012.

The Prince’s recent decision to give up flying helicopters and take an RAF desk job in London means he is now able to spend more time with Miss Bonas.

But experience suggests the country may be waiting a while yet for its next royal wedding. The then-Kate Middleton appeared as an official royal guest at Prince William’s Sandhurst passing out parade in 2006, but it was another five years before they were to marry.